Overbrook Entertainment partners Will and Jada Pinkett Smith are teaming up with Jay-Z to release movies.
According to Billboard, one of the first projects they’re embarking on is a remake of the Broadway classic “Annie,” in which The Smiths’s daughter, Willow, 9, would star. Willow is also signed to Jay-Z’s Roc Nation label, which produced her first certified Platinum single “Whip My Hair”.
“Annie” will be developed with Sony Pictures Entertainment and produced by Overbrook Entertainment and Jay-Z. The successful trio have also co-invested in beauty products line Carol’s Daughter, and co-produced “Fela!”—the Broadway play.
“The Overbrook Entertainment family and I have a unified vision. We’ve already produced a Tony Award-winning play and we’re developing a true superstar in Willow,” said Jay-Z in a statement. “This venture into film development and production is a perfect next step with teams that are accomplished, creative and innovative.”
It’s fitting that Brooklyn’s own would remake “Annie” has the MC sampled “It’s a Hard Knock Life,” from the “Annie” musical, in his hit “Hard Knock Live (Ghetto Anthem).”
Another musician set to turn actor is Kanye West. The Chi-town spitter is rumored to star as a gay band member in a movie about a 1939 jazz band. Oprah, Will Smith and West’s ‘H.A.M.’ collaborator are alledenly funding the project, but the reports have yet to be confirmed. —Nicole LoPresti
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(PRWeb January 26, 2011)
Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/superbowltickets/2011superbowltickets/prweb5005284.htm
Interactive Fellows Friday Feature!
Join the conversation by answering Fellows’ weekly questions via Facebook. This week, Ben asks:
In your everyday life, what have you seen that could be redesigned to better the world?
Click here to respond!
Tell us about your inventions. What was your inspiration to create them?
The Shredder is a new kind of all-terrain vehicle. In a recession it doesn’t make sense to have to buy an expensive snowmobile that you can ride for three months of the year and an ATV that you can ride for four months of the year. I wanted to make something small enough that you could fit it in the back of any car. And I wanted it to be something you’d be able to ride all year, whether in snow, sand, or mud. Something that would be really all-terrain, all year.
With that in mind, my partner Ryan Ferris and I came up with this cool stand-up power sport vehicle. It’s almost like a skateboard that you ride. It’s really a crossover between extreme and power sport. That’s where the idea started. It turns out that it’s this really compact modular platform that the military is interested in, for a whole bunch of other applications, as well.
The Uno started off as a high school science project. I got the idea when my dad had a business trip to China and my mom and I went along. This was at a time when global warming was really taking front and center in the news. Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth had just come out, and they were talking about pollution almost every day. I was at more or less the epicenter where all this bad stuff was happening. I remember reading in the paper that everyday 20,000 new cars were hitting Chinese roadways. I thought for my next science fair project I wanted to do something green.
I thought, “I know about motorcycles, what about some sort of green motorcycle or electric bike?” I wanted to do something that was really going to stand out and make a statement that being green can be cool.
So in grade 12, I came up with this new kind of electric motorcycle. I wanted it to be something small enough to store indoors: you could bring it up to your apartment to plug in and charge, and then you could ride it around on the road. Instead of having a wheel in the front and a wheel in back, there are two wheels side-by-side, and you sit over top of it. It’s kind of a crossover between a unicycle and a street bike, and it’s all electric.
After the science fair, it got a whole bunch of attention. I decided to take a year off of school to keep developing it and see where it went. Popular Science named it “Invention of the Year” and put it on the cover of their June 2008 issue. I ended up raising some capital, moving to Boston and opening a small office in Cambridge. We’ve been working on it for the last two years down in the States, while I’ve been going to school at MIT.
Are the Shredder and the Uno for sale now?
Neither of the projects are for sale yet. We’re still developing the Uno, we’re still developing the Shredder.
When I was at TED last year, the Shredder was really just a proof of concept. I built the first prototype by taking a year off of school to work on it with my partner. Eight months later, we have a contract with the US Air Force to develop a military version. We’re planning on doing our first production run and actually selling the units over the summer, which is pretty exciting.
We were working on the prototype, and decided to post some of our videos online. By the next night, we had 50,000 hits, and then 100,000 hits, and within a week we had over 1 million YouTube hits. People started blogging about this thing as a new military toy, which is something we had never really thought about. It was always supposed to be an extreme sports vehicle. Suddenly, we have all this attention, and everyone was focused on it as a new military transport, a personal rapid response unit. At that point we decided we weren’t going to partner up with another company, we were going to do it ourselves.
All of this happened in the last two to three months, so it’s been really tough being a full-time student. I end up not sleeping very much.
At the same time, the Uno has evolved, too. Originally it had two wheels and it balanced a lot like a Segway: lean forward to accelerate, lean back to decelerate. One of the problems was turning this really cool science project into something that we can actually sell to the public and ride on roads.
Now, the Segway can only go 10 miles per hour for a very good reason: it’s unsafe at high speeds. We came up with this really clever transforming design. We’ve gone through three different design prototype phases. And this new one is the final version that I think we’re going to be able to sell in the next year and a half. So both the Uno and the Shredder are finally closing in on a point where I’m going to have something I can actually sell.
What first got you interested in engineering and design?
My grandfather was a design engineer and he had a full shop in his basement, so I really grew up in the engineering world. I used to do little projects with him in the basement, like little rocket ships and trains. Nothing super crazy … he always just wanted to build things with me. That’s where I got the bug for it.
In grade nine, when I had my first science fair project, I ended up actually building it with him in the basement. He passed away two months after that, and I inherited all the equipment. So for the next four years that I was doing these science fair projects and robotics competitions, I had access to all the machinery I needed. I also had 13 years of experience in working with them. So it really let me build some pretty cool things.
Which inventor from history do you most admire?
When I was younger I read Nikola Tesla. He’s someone who was born into the wrong century. He was so far ahead of his time. I think the work that he came up with was really amazing. If he had had more resources, he could have had an even bigger impact on the world.
And one of the people I really admire right now is Steve Jobs. Apple comes up with some really amazing products, but he also really cares about design aesthetic and consumer experience. When the computer industry first started, he was a visionary who saw a lot of potential, and has shaped the way the whole industry has moved.
What do your parents think of all your success?
It’s difficult … you can argue that I haven’t achieved anything yet. There’s a lot of potential for these projects, but nothing has actually happened yet. All the media stuff that has happened is very exciting, but it doesn’t really mean very much yet.
All my mom really wants is that I get my engineering degree. I think if I told her that I got rid of both the companies and was just going to be a full-time student, that would be the best news in the world for her.
But my parents are very, very supportive. I’ve created a lot of headaches for them over the years, and they’ve always had my back 110 percent, which has been pretty amazing. And I’ve taken a lot of time off of school and they have still supported me, which has been really good.
I imagine you could have been a handful as a child.
I never really did anything the normal way. Ever. It created a lot of problems. Even when I was little, I was getting in trouble for stupid little things in school. If I had an idea of how something should be done, or what I wanted to do, I always ended up finding a way to do it my way, and that created friction along the way.
In high school, I liked working on my science projects more than going to class. I would skip school to work on my science project. It was weird, because the projects were doing well, and I was winning lots of awards with them, so I couldn’t really get in trouble. But I wasn’t doing very well in science class, even though I was going to all these international science fairs and winning all these awards.
When you went on the reality TV series Dragons’ Den to pitch the Uno to a panel of venture capitalists, were you nervous?
Not really, actually. This was just my own ignorance at the time, but the Uno had just gotten all this publicity. I figured it should be easy to raise money. I was getting all these emails from people wanting to invest. So I thought if I go on the show, it doesn’t actually matter if I make the deal or not, because I have all this other interest.
Little did I know that the recession was going to start like a month later, and four of the five dragons would end up bailing. But it let me go on the show with a lot of confidence. That helped, because the publicity of the show really helped put the Uno on the global stage, and also gave it credibility as a business project.
It was dumb luck that it worked out so well when I was on the show, because I probably should have been a lot more nervous.
There are many aspiring social entrepreneurs out there who are trying to take their passion and ideas to the next level. What is one piece of advice you would give to them based on your own experiences and successes? Learn more about how to become a great social entrepreneur from all of the TED Fellows on the Case Foundation blog.
It’s funny that you ask that. I get a lot of entrepreneurs and inventors emailing me or contacting me on Facebook, saying, “What should I do?” It sounds really corny, but you have to follow your passion. You’re going to sacrifice social life, you’re going to sacrifice sleep — you’re going to end up making a lot of sacrifices to make it work. If you really, really love it, you just have to find a way to make it work, and it’ll pay off.
Don’t let other people tell you you can’t do something. If you really want something badly enough, just figure out a way. Go talk to people, make the phone calls. It takes a lot of time and effort. That’s where you really have to believe in what you’re doing. It can’t be sort of a part-time thing. You have to be 100 percent behind it.
What has the TED Fellowship meant to you?
The first time I walked into the International Science Fair in grade nine, it hit me that “Holy shit, there’s so much amazing stuff going on.” I was competing at a science fair for $7 million in prizes, and I was hooked. I realized I wanted to do Science Fair for the rest of my life.
TED was the same thing for me. I’d never been in an environment like that before, where you’re exposed to that many amazing ideas. Really cool people that are all doing their own interesting projects. And it was just the neatest brainstorming session I’ve ever been to in my whole life. If I could, I’d be back there this year. Unfortunately, the tickets are too expensive, and I didn’t want to apply for a Senior Fellowship yet. But I definitely want to go back next year, and it definitely had a huge impact on my life.
How do you manage being a student and running two companies? Do you have any time for fun?
I actually disconnected my cable at the start of the semester, because I was spending way too much time watching TV. “Dexter” was one of my favorite shows, and I would sit and watch a whole season in an afternoon. I realized that if I was going to do school and work, I couldn’t have a TV as well.
Originally, when I started all this stuff, I thought I wanted to be an engineer. I loved actually building the projects. Over the last two years, there’s been a big shift in what I do with my time. I focus almost all my time on the business side now, raising money, running the two companies. And I realized that I actually really, really love business. There are very stressful times, and it’s a rollercoaster. There are great highs and there are lows. But I really like the business side of the companies. It’s fortunate that I actually like doing that. That is my fun time.
Hmm, I realize how pathetic that makes my life sound … I do actually do some fun things. I was out at the Playboy mansion for Halloween. I’ve been there a bunch of times. I do some fun things occasionally, but I also work a lot.
You’ve mentioned that it’s important to you that your inventions improve the world.
Yeah, the Uno is an electric vehicle, so it’s sort of self-explanatory how it’s going to have a positive impact.
The Shredder is a little tougher because it’s a recreational vehicle. But one of the things that we’re finding out now, with the military, is that that it has applications for search and rescue. As a matter of fact, we’ve done tests where it’s towed stretchers and things. By working as a robot, you can send a stretcher into the field and have it bring back an injured soldier, without having to risk any more soldiers’ lives. We’re looking at using it in disaster zones and fire mitigation. So it has all these really altruistic applications as well.
Beyond these two projects, I’m not really sure what I’m going to do next. My investors would kill me if I came up with another project before something happens with one of these. But whatever I do, I want to keep doing things that have the potential to have a positive impact.
Bill Zeller was a talented programmer whose work has been featured on Lifehacker. He took his own life on Sunday and left an explanation that I think it's important you read. Zeller was a victim of sexual and psychological abuse. It's clear from his writing that the abuse left him unable to interface with the world in any way that didn't leave him feeling he was too sullied to have the same experiences that he thought others had. He had a self-described "darkness", which despite his prostration it's clear he handled more ably than perhaps he ever realized. Programming was a solace, but only temporarily. Zeller never felt he could escape the things that had happened to him because he carried his torment with him everywhere. I think a person has the right to live or end their life as they choose. If Zeller really felt that suicide was his only option, so be it. But as someone who has had similar experiences in my own life, I want to say to anyone else who feels the way Zeller felt: You can't escape your past. Not completely. But you can deal with it. You can contextualize it. You can learn how to prepare for the times when you feel like it's not even on your radar and then it totally broadsides you. And you can talk to people. You really can.
Bill Zeller: I have the urge to declare my sanity and justify my actions, but I assume I'll never be able to convince anyone that this was the right decision. Maybe it's true that anyone who does this is insane by definition, but I can at least explain my reasoning. I considered not writing any of this because of how personal it is, but I like tying up loose ends and don't want people to wonder why I did this. Since I've never spoken to anyone about what happened to me, people would likely draw the wrong conclusions. My first memories as a child are of being raped, repeatedly. This has affected every aspect of my life. This darkness, which is the only way I can describe it, has followed me like a fog, but at times intensified and overwhelmed me, usually triggered by a distinct situation. In kindergarten I couldn't use the bathroom and would stand petrified whenever I needed to, which started a trend of awkward and unexplained social behavior. The damage that was done to my body still prevents me from using the bathroom normally, but now it's less of a physical impediment than a daily reminder of what was done to me. This darkness followed me as I grew up.
I remember spending hours playing with legos, having my world consist of me and a box of cold, plastic blocks. Just waiting for everything to end. It's the same thing I do now, but instead of legos it's surfing the web or reading or listening to a baseball game. Most of my life has been spent feeling dead inside, waiting for my body to catch up. At times growing up I would feel inconsolable rage, but I never connected this to what happened until puberty. I was able to keep the darkness at bay for a few hours at a time by doing things that required intense concentration, but it would always come back. Programming appealed to me for this reason. I was never particularly fond of computers or mathematically inclined, but the temporary peace it would provide was like a drug. But the darkness always returned and built up something like a tolerance, because programming has become less and less of a refuge. The darkness is with me nearly every time I wake up. I feel like a grime is covering me.
I feel like I'm trapped in a contimated body that no amount of washing will clean. Whenever I think about what happened I feel manic and itchy and can't concentrate on anything else. It manifests itself in hours of eating or staying up for days at a time or sleeping for sixteen hours straight or week long programming binges or constantly going to the gym. I'm exhausted from feeling like this every hour of every day. Three to four nights a week I have nightmares about what happened. It makes me avoid sleep and constantly tired, because sleeping with what feels like hours of nightmares is not restful. I wake up sweaty and furious. I'm reminded every morning of what was done to me and the control it has over my life. I've never been able to stop thinking about what happened to me and this hampered my social interactions. I would be angry and lost in thought and then be interrupted by someone saying "Hi" or making small talk, unable to understand why I seemed cold and distant. I walked around, viewing the outside world from a distant portal behind my eyes, unable to perform normal human niceties. I wondered what it would be like to take to other people without what happened constantly on my mind, and I wondered if other people had similar experiences that they were better able to mask. Alcohol was also something that let me escape the darkness. It would always find me later, though, and it was always angry that I managed to escape and it made me pay. Many of the irresponsible things I did were the result of the darkness. Obviously I'm responsible for every decision and action, including this one, but there are reasons why things happen the way they do. Alcohol and other drugs provided a way to ignore the realities of my situation. It was easy to spend the night drinking and forget that I had no future to look forward to. I never liked what alcohol did to me, but it was better than facing my existence honestly. I haven't touched alcohol or any other drug in over seven months (and no drugs or alcohol will be involved when I do this) and this has forced me to evaluate my life in an honest and clear way. There's no future here. The darkness will always be with me.
I used to think if I solved some problem or achieved some goal, maybe he would leave. It was comforting to identify tangible issues as the source of my problems instead of something that I'll never be able to change. I thought that if I got into to a good college, or a good grad school, or lost weight, or went to the gym nearly every day for a year, or created programs that millions of people used, or spent a summer or California or New York or published papers that I was proud of, then maybe I would feel some peace and not be constantly haunted and unhappy. But nothing I did made a dent in how depressed I was on a daily basis and nothing was in any way fulfilling. I'm not sure why I ever thought that would change anything. I didn't realize how deep a hold he had on me and my life until my first relationship. I stupidly assumed that no matter how the darkness affected me personally, my romantic relationships would somehow be separated and protected. Growing up I viewed my future relationships as a possible escape from this thing that haunts me every day, but I began to realize how entangled it was with every aspect of my life and how it is never going to release me. Instead of being an escape, relationships and romantic contact with other people only intensified everything about him that I couldn't stand. I will never be able to have a relationship in which he is not the focus, affecting every aspect of my romantic interactions. Relationships always started out fine and I'd be able to ignore him for a few weeks. But as we got closer emotionally the darkness would return and every night it'd be me, her and the darkness in a black and gruesome threesome. He would surround me and penetrate me and the more we did the more intense it became. It made me hate being touched, because as long as we were separated I could view her like an outsider viewing something good and kind and untainted. Once we touched, the darkness would envelope her too and take her over and the evil inside me would surround her. I always felt like I was infecting anyone I was with. Relationships didn't work. No one I dated was the right match, and I thought that maybe if I found the right person it would overwhelm him. Part of me knew that finding the right person wouldn't help, so I became interested in girls who obviously had no interest in me.
For a while I thought I was gay. I convinced myself that it wasn't the darkness at all, but rather my orientation, because this would give me control over why things didn't feel "right". The fact that the darkness affected sexual matters most intensely made this idea make some sense and I convinced myself of this for a number of years, starting in college after my first relationship ended. I told people I was gay (at Trinity, not at Princeton), even though I wasn't attracted to men and kept finding myself interested in girls. Because if being gay wasn't the answer, then what was? People thought I was avoiding my orientation, but I was actually avoiding the truth, which is that while I'm straight, I will never be content with anyone. I know now that the darkness will never leave. Last spring I met someone who was unlike anyone else I'd ever met. Someone who showed me just how well two people could get along and how much I could care about another human being. Someone I know I could be with and love for the rest of my life, if I weren't so fucked up. Amazingly, she liked me. She liked the shell of the man the darkness had left behind. But it didn't matter because I couldn't be alone with her. It was never just the two of us, it was always the three of us: her, me and the darkness. The closer we got, the more intensely I'd feel the darkness, like some evil mirror of my emotions. All the closeness we had and I loved was complemented by agony that I couldn't stand, from him. I realized that I would never be able to give her, or anyone, all of me or only me. She could never have me without the darkness and evil inside me. I could never have just her, without the darkness being a part of all of our interactions. I will never be able to be at peace or content or in a healthy relationship. I realized the futility of the romantic part of my life. If I had never met her, I would have realized this as soon as I met someone else who I meshed similarly well with. It's likely that things wouldn't have worked out with her and we would have broken up (with our relationship ending, like the majority of relationships do) even if I didn't have this problem, since we only dated for a short time.
But I will face exactly the same problems with the darkness with anyone else. Despite my hopes, love and compatability is not enough. Nothing is enough. There's no way I can fix this or even push the darkness down far enough to make a relationship or any type of intimacy feasible. So I watched as things fell apart between us. I had put an explicit time limit on our relationship, since I knew it couldn't last because of the darkness and didn't want to hold her back, and this caused a variety of problems. She was put in an unnatural situation that she never should have been a part of. It must have been very hard for her, not knowing what was actually going on with me, but this is not something I've ever been able to talk about with anyone. Losing her was very hard for me as well. Not because of her (I got over our relationship relatively quickly), but because of the realization that I would never have another relationship and because it signified the last true, exclusive personal connection I could ever have. This wasn't apparent to other people, because I could never talk about the real reasons for my sadness. I was very sad in the summer and fall, but it was not because of her, it was because I will never escape the darkness with anyone. She was so loving and kind to me and gave me everything I could have asked for under the circumstances. I'll never forget how much happiness she brought me in those briefs moments when I could ignore the darkness. I had originally planned to kill myself last winter but never got around to it. (Parts of this letter were written over a year ago, other parts days before doing this.) It was wrong of me to involve myself in her life if this were a possibility and I should have just left her alone, even though we only dated for a few months and things ended a long time ago. She's just one more person in a long list of people I've hurt. I could spend pages talking about the other relationships I've had that were ruined because of my problems and my confusion related to the darkness. I've hurt so many great people because of who I am and my inability to experience what needs to be experienced.
All I can say is that I tried to be honest with people about what I thought was true. I've spent my life hurting people. Today will be the last time. I've told different people a lot of things, but I've never told anyone about what happened to me, ever, for obvious reasons. It took me a while to realize that no matter how close you are to someone or how much they claim to love you, people simply cannot keep secrets. I learned this a few years ago when I thought I was gay and told people. The more harmful the secret, the juicier the gossip and the more likely you are to be betrayed. People don't care about their word or what they've promised, they just do whatever the fuck they want and justify it later. It feels incredibly lonely to realize you can never share something with someone and have it be between just the two of you. I don't blame anyone in particular, I guess it's just how people are. Even if I felt like this is something I could have shared, I have no interest in being part of a friendship or relationship where the other person views me as the damaged and contaminated person that I am. So even if I were able to trust someone, I probably would not have told them about what happened to me. At this point I simply don't care who knows. I feel an evil inside me. An evil that makes me want to end life. I need to stop this. I need to make sure I don't kill someone, which is not something that can be easily undone. I don't know if this is related to what happened to me or something different.
I recognize the irony of killing myself to prevent myself from killing someone else, but this decision should indicate what I'm capable of. So I've realized I will never escape the darkness or misery associated with it and I have a responsibility to stop myself from physically harming others. I'm just a broken, miserable shell of a human being. Being molested has defined me as a person and shaped me as a human being and it has made me the monster I am and there's nothing I can do to escape it. I don't know any other existence. I don't know what life feels like where I'm apart from any of this. I actively despise the person I am. I just feel fundamentally broken, almost non-human. I feel like an animal that woke up one day in a human body, trying to make sense of a foreign world, living among creatures it doesn't understand and can't connect with. I have accepted that the darkness will never allow me to be in a relationship. I will never go to sleep with someone in my arms, feeling the comfort of their hands around me. I will never know what uncontimated intimacy is like. I will never have an exclusive bond with someone, someone who can be the recipient of all the love I have to give. I will never have children, and I wanted to be a father so badly. I think I would have made a good dad. And even if I had fought through the darkness and married and had children all while being unable to feel intimacy, I could have never done that if suicide were a possibility.
I did try to minimize pain, although I know that this decision will hurt many of you. If this hurts you, I hope that you can at least forget about me quickly. There's no point in identifying who molested me, so I'm just going to leave it at that. I doubt the word of a dead guy with no evidence about something that happened over twenty years ago would have much sway. You may wonder why I didn't just talk to a professional about this. I've seen a number of doctors since I was a teenager to talk about other issues and I'm positive that another doctor would not have helped. I was never given one piece of actionable advice, ever. More than a few spent a large part of the session reading their notes to remember who I was. And I have no interest in talking about being raped as a child, both because I know it wouldn't help and because I have no confidence it would remain secret. I know the legal and practical limits of doctor/patient confidentiality, growing up in a house where we'd hear stories about the various mental illnesses of famous people, stories that were passed down through generations. All it takes is one doctor who thinks my story is interesting enough to share or a doctor who thinks it's her right or responsibility to contact the authorities and have me identify the molestor (justifying her decision by telling herself that someone else might be in danger). All it takes is a single doctor who violates my trust, just like the "friends" who I told I was gay did, and everything would be made public and I'd be forced to live in a world where people would know how fucked up I am. And yes, I realize this indicates that I have severe trust issues, but they're based on a large number of experiences with people who have shown a profound disrepect for their word and the privacy of others. People say suicide is selfish. I think it's selfish to ask people to continue living painful and miserable lives, just so you possibly won't feel sad for a week or two. Suicide may be a permanent solution to a temporary problem, but it's also a permanent solution to a ~23 year-old problem that grows more intense and overwhelming every day.
Some people are just dealt bad hands in this life. I know many people have it worse than I do, and maybe I'm just not a strong person, but I really did try to deal with this. I've tried to deal with this every day for the last 23 years and I just can't fucking take it anymore. I often wonder what life must be like for other people. People who can feel the love from others and give it back unadulterated, people who can experience sex as an intimate and joyous experience, people who can experience the colors and happenings of this world without constant misery. I wonder who I'd be if things had been different or if I were a stronger person. It sounds pretty great. I'm prepared for death. I'm prepared for the pain and I am ready to no longer exist. Thanks to the strictness of New Jersey gun laws this will probably be much more painful than it needs to be, but what can you do. My only fear at this point is messing something up and surviving.
—- I'd also like to address my family, if you can call them that. I despise everything they stand for and I truly hate them, in a non-emotional, dispassionate and what I believe is a healthy way. The world will be a better place when they're dead—one with less hatred and intolerance. If you're unfamiliar with the situation, my parents are fundamentalist Christians who kicked me out of their house and cut me off financially when I was 19 because I refused to attend seven hours of church a week. They live in a black and white reality they've constructed for themselves. They partition the world into good and evil and survive by hating everything they fear or misunderstand and calling it love. They don't understand that good and decent people exist all around us, "saved" or not, and that evil and cruel people occupy a large percentage of their church. They take advantage of people looking for hope by teaching them to practice the same hatred they practice.
A random example: "I am personally convinced that if a Muslim truly believes and obeys the Koran, he will be a terrorist." - George Zeller, August 24, 2010.
If you choose to follow a religion where, for example, devout Catholics who are trying to be good people are all going to Hell but child molestors go to Heaven (as long as they were "saved" at some point), that's your choice, but it's fucked up. Maybe a God who operates by those rules does exist. If so, fuck Him. Their church was always more important than the members of their family and they happily sacrificed whatever necessary in order to satisfy their contrived beliefs about who they should be.
I grew up in a house where love was proxied through a God I could never believe in. A house where the love of music with any sort of a beat was literally beaten out of me. A house full of hatred and intolerance, run by two people who were experts at appearing kind and warm when others were around. Parents who tell an eight year old that his grandmother is going to Hell because she's Catholic. Parents who claim not to be racist but then talk about the horrors of miscegenation. I could list hundreds of other examples, but it's tiring. Since being kicked out, I've interacted with them in relatively normal ways. I talk to them on the phone like nothing happened. I'm not sure why. Maybe because I like pretending I have a family. Maybe I like having people I can talk to about what's been going on in my life. Whatever the reason, it's not real and it feels like a sham. I should have never allowed this reconnection to happen.
I wrote the above a while ago, and I do feel like that much of the time. At other times, though, I feel less hateful. I know my parents honestly believe the crap they believe in. I know that my mom, at least, loved me very much and tried her best. One reason I put this off for so long is because I know how much pain it will cause her. She has been sad since she found out I wasn't "saved", since she believes I'm going to Hell, which is not a sadness for which I am responsible. That was never going to change, and presumably she believes the state of my physical body is much less important than the state of my soul. Still, I cannot intellectually justify this decision, knowing how much it will hurt her. Maybe my ability to take my own life, knowing how much pain it will cause, shows that I am a monster who doesn't deserve to live.
All I know is that I can't deal with this pain any longer and I'm am truly sorry I couldn't wait until my family and everyone I knew died so this could be done without hurting anyone. For years I've wished that I'd be hit by a bus or die while saving a baby from drowning so my death might be more acceptable, but I was never so lucky. —- To those of you who have shown me love, thank you for putting up with all my shittiness and moodiness and arbitrariness. I was never the person I wanted to be. Maybe without the darkness I would have been a better person, maybe not. I did try to be a good person, but I realize I never got very far. I'm sorry for the pain this causes. I really do wish I had another option. I hope this letter explains why I needed to do this. If you can't understand this decision, I hope you can at least forgive me. Bill Zeller
—- Please save this letter and repost it if gets deleted. I don't want people to wonder why I did this. I disseminated it more widely than I might have otherwise because I'm worried that my family might try to restrict access to it. I don't mind if this letter is made public. In fact, I'd prefer it be made public to people being unable to read it and drawing their own conclusions.
Thank You LifeHacker for sharing!
HC
We got to step up!.. Granted.. the police in the US will just SHOOT YOU!